Sunday Showcase December 7, 1980

This trip back in time lands us in December of 1980. This Sunday Showcase came out a day before John Lennon was murdered in New York City. The December 14 issue will feature an interview with Yoko Ono done before his Lennon's tragic death and it will also see "Starting Over" break into the Top Ten records in Nashville. The cover of the December 7, 1980 Showcase features Marie Osmond promoting her new show sans Donny, Robert Urich, and The Marshall Tucker Band.

Those Tucker boys from Caroline would be in Nashville with .38 Special to play Municipal on December 13th. This is a classic case of the opening band being on the rise while the headliners had peaked and were starting to go down in popularity. I like both groups so it would have been a great night of Southern rock and roll if I could have gone, but I was still a few years away from enjoying the confines of Municipal. Plus, there was a competing show in town that I would have preferred to attend if able. 

Christmas is fast approaching now as it was then, but if you want pictures with Santa Claus these days I don't Hickory Hollow Mall is an option. I spent lots of time at that mall in the late 70's and 80's. It was really a wonderful place for a teenager. This ad, however, is a creepy. I don't think people want "A Touch of Claus", but I would love to see if anyone had photos made with Santa there.

Later in the month you could see some more Southern rock with the partially resurrected Lynyrd Skynyrd; Rossington Collins Band. It became crystal clear a few years later that a reconstituted Lynyrd Skynyrd was what the fans really wanted, but back in 1979/80 the Rossington Collins Band was a huge deal to Southern rock fans. They would end their shows with an instrumental version of the obligatory "Free Bird" and I bet there wouldn't be a dry eye in the place. Mother's Finest and LeRoux were also on the bill.

You could go ice skating at Municipal Auditorium too! I don't really know why a spectator would need to pay 50 cents to watch though. Roller skating was my thing back in 1980 and I always wanted to try ice skating too, but I never have. I doubt my weak ankles would like it. 

Check out the stellar lineup you could see at Exit/In during this time. It's amazing. 

  

The Top Ten best selling pop records in Nashville list was always a part of the Sunday Showcase I looked forward to each week. The number one song is Leo Sayer's "More Than I Can Say." The song would never hit the top spot in the US being kept out by "Lady" by Kenny Rogers and Lennon's "Starting Over." The music video for it is interesting. Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" had been on the Nashville charts for 12 weeks! The Dukes of Hazzard became a smash it during this time and so Waylon Jennings's theme song hits the Nashville Top Ten for the first time. I would switch out my roller skating night from Friday to Saturday just to watch them Duke boys and Daisy...especially Daisy. Kool & The Gang's "Celebration" was heating up the charts and it ended up being the song I associated the most with the upcoming New Year's celebration. Most of these tunes would be played at the skating rink and that's where I came to love Air Supply's "Every Woman In The World." I still have the 45 I bought back then. "Freedom" by Grand Master Flash stands out for me on this list. First, the tune is by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five so they got the name wrong. Secondly, this is a tune that didn't even hit the top 100 nationally. It didn't even make the top ten R & B charts. But here it is in it's second week in the Top Ten Nashville charts. It would drop out in the next week, but it shows Nashville had a nascent hip-hop rap scene back then. New Life Records, which just closed permanently this year after having been open since April 1, 1976, had to have been a huge reason for this as they could provide fans of the music the records. Nashville was always way more than just country music and I am glad to have grown up right down the road from it.

Some more live music you could see: How about Juke at the Ramada Inn South. I don't know a thing about these guys. They were probably a cover band. I just love the ad mentioning that Tuesday is "Foxy Lady Night" because it looks like the guys in Juke are checking out the foxy ladies.

The best upcoming music concert is Nashville is by an up and coming young guy from Minnesota. He'd had a hit on his last record with "I Wanna Be Your Lover", but massive mainstream success was still a few years away. He would be booed when he opened for The Rolling Stones in 1981. Prince is headed to town on his Dirty Mind tour to play not one, but two shows on December 13th at the Tennessee Theater. Forget Marshall Tucker and .38 Special, this would have been the place to be on that particular night. If I was forced to only own the records of one artist, Prince would probably be the one I would want. My love for his music only grows as the years go by. His tunes always make me feel good. Teena Marie was another one of my favorites from this time too. If you were there that night, please let me know with a comment. He played Municipal the next time he came to town for the Controversy Tour.

I don't have a setlist for either of these shows in Nashville, but a typical Dirty Mind setlist looks like this: 

1.   Do It All Night

2.   Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?

3.   Gotta Broken Heart Again

4.   Broken

5.   When You Were Mine

6.   Sexy Dancer

7.   Sister

8.   I Wanna Be Your Lover

9.   Head

10. Still Waiting

11. Uptown

12. Gotta Stop (Messin' About)

13. Dirty Mind

That's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this post. I'll be back next week with another look back at a random Sunday Showcase. Leave a comment, tell your friends, spread the word, or go outside and take a walk. That's what I'm going to do. 

                

Sunday Showcase November 10, 1974

I know all of you loyal readers love diving right into highlights from past Sunday Showcases, but I'm afraid if this is to continue I'm just going to have to solicit some advertisers. I hope you don't mind.

Be sure and run by Cain-Sloan after reading this and buy something from those fine folks. I'd go for the stereo myself. I can use it to play the Top Ten Songs of the week in Nashville. 

So what big rock and roll and soul shows were on tap for this November? The Woodstock sensation SHA NA NA promise An Evening of Nostalgia at the Municipal Auditorium on Friday November 15th.

Dickey Betts was putting on "An American Music Show" at the New Grand Ole Opry House. Americana music has been around much longer than No Depression magazine. 

Mountain with James Gang will journey to Murfreesboro for a Murphy Center concert. I wonder if Tommy Bolin was still in the James Gang at this point? 

Earth, Wind And Fire have no need for an Oxford comma. They had plenty of funk instead. They were riding high in 1974. Their album Open Our Eyes hit No. 1 on the Billboard Soul chart and No. 15 on the Pop chart. They backed up Ramsey Lewis on the Sun Goddess record and it also hit No. 1 on the Soul chart and made No. 12 on the Pop chart. 

Excuse me here. It's time to run another advertisement or I can't pay my bills. If you ever find yourself in LaVergne, Mt. Juliet, or Manchester and want to do some department store shopping you won't go wrong with M & M Variety Mart. I know I've got my eye on that Playskool McDonald's set. 

The biggest concert on the horizon for Nashville in November, 1974 would have to be David Bowie live at Municipal Auditorium. It was ostensibly the Diamond Dogs Tour, but near the end of the tour he began to add songs from the Young Americans album into the setlist and it became the Soul Tour. This show was the second to last one with a performance in Atlanta's Omni on December 1st closing out his concert run in America for the year. He performed on the Dick Cavett Show on December 4th. Bowie was just an incredible artist whose influence on popular music was and still is massive.

Here's the setlist:

 1. Memory of a Free Festival
 2. Rebel Rebel
 3. John, I'm Only Dancing (Again)
 4. Sorrow
 5. Changes
 6. Young Americans
 7. 1984
 8. Rock 'n' Roll With Me
 9. Love Me Do
10. The Jean Genie
11. Moonage Daydream
12. Can You Hear Me
13. Knock On Wood
14. Suffragette City
15. Rock 'n' Roll Suicide
Encore
16. Future Legend
17. Diamond Dogs

Our time this Sunday is drawing to a close, so let's figure out what worth's watching on television. We're going with Friday November 15, 1974. I'm going to develop a stomach ache and stay home from school so I can watch TV all day. 

If I get up early it will be either Ralph Emery or Carl Tipton at 6AM. I'm watching Bozo for sure at 7AM. Heck, I'd probably watch it even now. New Zoo Review was the stuff of nightmares even when I was a kid so I'm flipping over to Channel 5 to see Captain Kangaroo. If that bored me I would switch over to Green Acres on the half hour. 9AM brings Sesame Street into my home and even though I was pushing 8 years old I still wouldn't miss it. I might flip over to High Rollers or I might stay with PBS and hope Spiderman is on Electric Company. Hollywood Squares was amusing to me as a child, even if I didn't get most of the jokes. One of my favorite public television shows ever called Inside/Out came on at 11:30AM. Someone uploaded a bunch to YouTube a few years ago and I watched them all over again and was just as entranced by it. 

I remember seeing the Noon Show on Channel 4. I would often be eating a cheese sandwich while it aired. Much of the early afternoon is filled with soap operas that often acted as background noise when I was a kid. My granny would only watch Channel 5 soaps while my mother watched Channel 2's offerings. I know most Generation X types like myself remember watching the hour long Price Is Right in the mornings when staying at home sick from school, but in 1974 it was still only a half hour in length and aired at 2PM. Match Game was on at 2:30PM and I was in my element gulping down a Coke and a honey bun while Charles Nelson Reilly and Fannie Flagg cracked me up. Tattetales confused me. I could have sworn Gilligan's Island ran every weekday of my youth, but obviously not as it is not on this schedule. The Channel 5 afternoon movie is and if had been Elvis week, Universal monsters week, or Godzilla week I would have tuned in. 

There's so many great choices in the early evening. The Andy Griffith Show, the Flintstones, Leave It To Beaver, the Lucy Show, and The Mike Douglas Show are all solid possibilities, but I'm most likely to be watching Mister Rogers and Villa Alegre. 5PM brought solid choices with Family Affair, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. and Electric Company again. I would have loved to watch Sesame Street again, but in my house it was usually the Channel 5 News at 6PM and then To Tell The Truth at 6:30PM. If I was very lucky though I'd be able to flip over to Channel 8 again and see another all time favorite Zoom. I think most people my age know Boston's zip code thanks to this show. Who else wanted one of those awesome long sleeved striped shirts? 

7PM on this night would present another of those agonizing choices with Sanford & Son and Chico & The Man on NBC going up against the Planet of the Apes series on CBS. I'm going ape I guess. Seeing The Six Million Dollar Man listed on any day other than Sunday is weird, but it didn't begin showing on Sundays until January 19, 1975. It was up against the Rockford Files which was another show I really enjoyed. 9PM is time for Kolchak: Night Stalker which I was allowed to stay up and see since it was a Friday. I'd often get to see the Tonight Show too. 

That's it for this Sunday's visit to the past. I'll be here again next week with some more old newspaper clippings and other junk. 

Note****Advertisements are for businesses long closed so don't actually try to patronize them.

Sunday Showcase October 21, 1979 All Kinds Of Things To Do In The Past

I've done a Top Ten songs from September of 1979 so that's not going to be the focus this week as I dive into another Sunday Showcase. This time we're thumbing through the October 21, 1979 issue. If you were looking for something to do over the next few weeks back then there was concerts galore to choose from. That very Sunday night you could make the drive to Cookeville, Tennessee and catch Peter Frampton in concert at the Hooper Eblen Center. $7.50 back then is the equivalent of $26.52 in 2019. Frampton was on the downswing, but I bet he put on a great show for the Tennessee Tech Homecoming.

If you weren't in the mood for a rock concert you could venture out and catch Skatetown USA at various theaters around Nashville. Roller skating was hot and it got a lot of interest from Hollywood and mass media around this time. I was almost 13 and loved to go roller skating, but didn't have much interest in the movies about it really. Scott Baio stars in this one which is about him battling Patrick Swayze, in his film debut, in a roller disco competition. Maureen McCormick is in this one too so if you're a Brady Bunch fan it's worth a look. 

Perhaps you weren't into Peter Frampton or roller disco movies. Sound Seventy had a plethora of concerts coming up over the next 10 days. Earth, Wind & Fire were performing the very next night, October 22, at Municipal Auditorium on their Tour of the World 1979. I initially found it strange that the ad states that "Earth, Wind & Fire will perform this concert in its ENTIRETY" as I would hope any group would play an entire concert, but I suppose it was just to alert folks that there was no opening act. It does say the show begins promptly at 8pm. Earth, Wind & Fire were at their peak in this era. Here's a song from them in 1979.

If a "Boogie Wonderland" was not your thing you could go see John Prine with Delbert McClinton opening on October 26 at the Tennessee Theatre. Prine had decided to go with a rockabilly sound on his latest album Pink Cadillac. It's not one of my favorite things he's done, but it is notable that he did this years before Neil Young. Delbert was going to hit the Top 40 in the next year with "Giving It All Up For Your Love."

Jethro Tull was coming to town on October 30, 1979 with opening act, U.K., to perform at Municipal Auditorium. There are lots of YouTube posts of Tull on this tour so if you're interested feel free to check it out. The show that I would have wanted to see, if I had been allowed to go out and see concerts back then, was Parliament Funkadelic on Halloween of 1979 no less. The Brides of Funkenstein opened up with Nashville Municipal Auditorium once again being the place to be. George Clinton and his various crews put out so much music then, but judging from the ad I guess this is the tour for Funkadelic's Uncle Jam Wants You and not for Motor Booty Affair. Still, how can I resist putting up this performance from earlier in 1979.

You could go check out Stanley Clarke in concert at the Tennessee Theatre on November 1, 1979. He would have been on the road promoting his live album released earlier in the year titled I Wanna Play For You. It's always cool to see someone using a typically rhythm instrument as a lead one.

If you think that's all that was going on you would be wrong. Nashville is Music City after all. Vanderbilt's Homecoming was happening that same week and they had one of the all time legends coming to play Memorial Gym on Friday November 2, 1979. You could go see Ray Charles for under $10.

The biggest concert of the season was probably the arrival in Murfreesboro on November 8th of the Eagles as they played Murphy Center on The Long Run Tour 79. I was in 7th grade and I remember kids in Eagles Long Run concert t-shirts all over Central Middle School the next day.

So what was the hottest song in Nashville in this Sunday Showcase from 40 years ago.....why it was M's "Pop Musik" which I first heard on television as I watched Nickelodeon's Pop Clips religiously. 

Thus ends another weekly dip into an old Tennessean Sunday Showcase. Note the typo for song number 6 in the the Top Ten.....or maybe it's a rare alternate version. I try to put this stuff up every Sunday. So, if you enjoy it, bookmark Soulfish Stew and have a mess of it every chance you can get. Tell your friends, there's plenty more to go around.

Sunday Showcase Top Pop Songs In Nashville October 5, 1986

I was not into mainstream pop music at all circa 1986. I knew what was playing on college radio and that was about it. WRVU 91.1 at Vanderbilt was once a beacon of alternative music, but like most everything from that era in Nashville it's now long gone. Sold out to classical music. The top alternative songs from 1986 as a whole taken from a website called Pulse:

01 REM - Superman
02 New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle
03 Dramarama - Anything, Anything (I'll Give You)
04 INXS - What You Need
05 Smithereens - Blood And Roses
06 Gene Loves Jezebel - Desire (Come And Get It)
07 Wang Chung - Everybody Have Fun Tonight
08 Talking Heads - Wild, Wild Life
09 OMD - If You Leave
10 Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer

Let's see: I think I had every album these songs came from back then except for Wang Chung, Gene Loves Jezebel, and Peter Gabriel. Gabriel was much more mainstream than alternative. Keep in mind that was an annual list. This top ten from The Tennessean Sunday Showcase from October 5, 1986 is just a weekly look at what was hot.

I liked Bananarama and picked up their album used at some point. Lionel Richie is okay. I have never seen Top Gun so Berlin's tune doesn't do anything for me. All of the rest are unmemorable except for one tune which towers over the list and that would be Run-DMC's "Walk This Way." I most likely bought "Raising Hell" on cassette the day it was released. I was a huge Run-DMC fan. Heck I was a huge hip hop fan in addition to loving heavy metal and punk. That tune is the shining beacon in that top ten from then.

Sunday Showcase Top Pop Songs In Nashville September 28, 1980

I've written about roller skating here before and this Top Ten from the September 28, 1980 Tennessean Sunday Showcase takes me back to that time again. So many of the songs in that week were staples at Skatecenter West aka Jack's. It was about a month into 8th grade and my life was devoted to baseball cards, comics, KX104, and roller skating. Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" is my favorite from this Top Ten. I even bought the 45.